I was the dressmaker's daughterour dialogue was fabric, colour,embroidery, pins and scissors.The almost silent soundof snipped cloth fallingon the table round my feet.

A bodice of pins drew downover my head like a scaffold.I spent my childhood in the seaor standing on a table – 'A sway back!'she said proudly.Once I wore a tablecloth as a skirtto school and before that curtainsas a dress.I was always proud. The coloursclung like flowers. I was summer,autumn, spring. Never winter.'See,' she'd say, 'a pocket.'Cutting fabric to a map like AustraliaThen inserting flagpoles of pinson the beaches.'You can never match blue!'Bodice, baste, peplum, flare,dart, placket, gusset, yoke.Air suddenly swept round my legsThen my armpits grew coolas the cold blades clippedand my shoulder appeared.There are no scars as no fleshWas ever snicked so nothing bled.No sister interruptedthe lavish pageant,the geometry of adornment.

Kate Llewellyn is the author of twenty-four books comprising eight of poetry, five of travel, journals, memoirs, letters and essays. She is the co-editor of The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets and is the author of the bestseller The Waterlily: A Blue Mountains Journal. Her most recent books are A Fig at the Gate, a book of nature writing and poems, published by Allen & Unwin, and First Things First, a book of her letters edited by Dr Ruth Bacchus and Dr Barbara Hill, published by Wakefield Press.